While free e-mail isn’t a huge money-maker — Mehta said Outlook.com carries about 60 percent fewer advertisements than Microsoft’s previous Hotmail product — the Redmond, Washington- based company considers it critical to gaining and retaining consumers. Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker, has been losing users of its Windows operating system to smartphones and tablets such as Apple Inc.’s iPad.

According to Mehta, roughly 20 million of Outlook.com’s users have switched from Gmail and now use the service as their “primary free e-mail account.” There is of course no real way of knowing how many users have actually decided to make the switch, and how many of those users are continuing to use both accounts. As for the Scroogled campaign, Mehta shared that Microsoft is spending “tens of millions” on many TV, online print, and bus ads in the US, as well as TV ads in Europe slated to debut in the coming weeks.

Google can now check the University of Pennsylvania off its ever-growing list of ivy leaguers wielding Google Apps for Education, because the school just announced a recent move from Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail to Gmail.

The Philadelphia-based private university ranks No. 5 in National Universities, according to U.S. News and World Report, and it joins over 60 other leading institutions from the nation’s top 100 to use Google Apps. Harvard College, Yale, and Brown University are a few of the more prominent schools to top Google’s list.

Penn changed services after studying student email trends:

“We just saw more than 50 percent of students forward emails from their Hotmail to Gmail accounts and thought it would be more convenient this way,” said Director of Social Sciences Computing and Student Technology Chris Mustazza to The Daily Pennsylvanian.